Magnetic resonance imaging of the monkey fetal brain in utero.

• Authors: Xiao Zhang, Emory University
• Journal Title: Investig Magn Reson Imaging
• Volume: Volume 26, Number 4
• Publisher: Korean Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine | 2022-12, Pages 177-190
• Type of Work: Article | Post-print: After Peer Review
• Publisher DOI: http://doi.org/10.13104/imri.2022.26.4.177
• Subjects: Health Sciences, Pharmacology
• Keywords: MRI; development; diffusion tensor imaging; function connectivity; nonhuman primate; rsfMRI

Abstract

Non-human primates (NHPs) are the closest living relatives of the human and play a critical role in investigating the effects of maternal viral infection and consumption of medicines, drugs, and alcohol on fetal development. With the advance of contemporary fast MRI techniques with parallel imaging, fetal MRI is becoming a robust tool increasingly used in clinical practice and preclinical studies to examine congenital abnormalities including placental dysfunction, congenital heart disease (CHD), and brain abnormalities non-invasively. Because NHPs are usually scanned under anesthesia, the motion artifact is reduced substantially, allowing multi-parameter MRI techniques to be used intensively to examine the fetal development in a single scanning session or longitudinal studies. In this paper, the MRI techniques for scanning monkey fetal brains in utero in biomedical research are summarized. Also, a fast imaging protocol including T2-weighted imaging, diffusion MRI, resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) to examine rhesus monkey fetal brains in utero on a clinical 3T scanner is introduced.